The goal of competitive sport is to be first; This is especially true when it comes to the Olympics. In this sense, it should be noted that Karl Stankiewitz and Allitera Verlag published the book “München 72” at the end of 2021. A number of works have been announced for the 50th anniversary of the Munich Games that will soon compete for buyers’ favor, and Stankiewitz’s book is at least one of the first three on offer. From a sporting point of view, this could be described as winning a medal. However, “München 72” is not about sport, but about “how the Olympics changed a city,” as the subtitle says.
The author seems predestined for this topic. Karl Stankiewitz witnessed the entire post-war development of Munich. He has worked for various media in the city since 1947, including for a short time for the SZ. Stankiewitz is now 93 and operates as one of the oldest active journalists in Germany. That is worthy of all honor, but with all due respect it does not release him or the publisher from the duty of care required before publication.
“München 72” provides interesting insights into the late 1960s and early 1970s, it provides an overview of the progress made in the city’s gradual transformation up to the games, and in places it also conveys the flair and atmosphere of that time. But that was rather involuntarily: due to terms such as comtess (for an unmarried countess), whores (for prostitutes), Mohammedaner (for Muslims) or oriental (for the Near and Middle East), which were used at the time but have now fallen out of date. Stankiewitz takes the outdated words without classifying them (“as they were called back then”), reinforcing the overall impression that he’s simply recycled his old articles, albeit without putting too much effort into compiling them, let alone updating them .
The book lacks the reflective retrospective. For example, Stankiewitz writes of the “not always plausible pictograms” by the designer Otl Aicher, which have long been considered universally understandable graphics worldwide. Everything that came about after 1972 in terms of findings, assessments and evaluations has not been included in the text, but was added as a note at the end. Only in this small print do you find out how expensive the games were in the end. Before that, Stankiewitz repeatedly reports daily cost increases.
But are the numbers correct? In any case, he puts the length of the subway network created in the course of the Olympics at 4,200 kilometers. 4200? If you laid rails one after the other over this length, you could travel from Munich’s Marienplatz to the Mohammedans in the Orient, roughly to Doha, the capital of Qatar. The Munich transport company (MVG) itself comes to “almost 100 km” for its subway route network.
In addition to archaic words, Stankiewitz also adopted errors from his old articles. For him, the well-known sports scientist Ommo Grupe from Tübingen is still called the Otto Group today. But there are also new mistakes: In the third picture, the Olympic basketball hall is already being moved to the Olympic Park, where it is in Sendling on the edge of the West Park, which was laid out later. The frequent sentence errors are also annoying, such as: “… may remain open until 9 p.m.” (sic!). Or: “On a circular from the schools…” (also sic!). The beginning of a section with the words: “It’s raining in Rügen” is also surprising. As you read on, you get the thought that it should be more like “streaming”, because otherwise the following sentence doesn’t make any sense.
Reading “München 72” is no real pleasure. Proper editing and careful proofreading would have done the work good, even if it had taken time and the book had therefore been published later. The first do not necessarily have to be the best. If you jump off too early, you run the risk of producing a false start.
Karl Stankiewitz: Munich 1972. How Olympia changed a city. Allitera Verlag, 256 pages, 25 euros.